Yellow Post | Architecture Now

This 12 months marks a particular milestone for the Brick Bay Folly programme. It’s celebrating 10 years since its launch, when the fantastical, rubber-tyre-clad Stomach of the Beast took up residence excessive on a hill overlooking the sculpture park.

As we speak, a decade on, a folly rivalling the primary in each top and presence has appeared on a brand new web site, the third to be activated, extending the lives of the follies on present from two years to three.

Yellow Submit is a towering, whimsical construction made up of 12 eleven-metre-high, tapering glulam posts, with 24 cloth sheets embedded into the venture’s horizontal split-beam members.

The origins of the design pay homage to the historic hākari scaffold phases as soon as constructed by iwi within the Northland settlement of Kororāreka as centrepieces for communal ceremony, celebration and congregation. Folly designers George Culling, Oliver Prisk, Henry Mabin and André Vachias first learnt of those constructions in Robin Skinner’s lectures at Te Herenga Waka Victoria College of Wellington’s College of Structure.

“What actually struck us was how these monumental timber edifices articulated a delicacy and consideration in direction of temporal constructing,” says Prisk. “The scaffold construction was usually totally erected for less than quite a lot of days earlier than disassembly, so the idea responded properly to the folly temporary by way of each its non permanent nature and it being a spot to collect and have a good time.” 

Acutely aware that the illustrations studied in Skinner’s class have been representations of an indigenous construction via a colonial lens, the folly staff engaged with native iwi Ngāti Manuhiri to study extra in regards to the significance of the hākari.

Modifications to the preliminary design have been pretty minimal. “On recommendation from mentor Pip Cheshire, the construction rose from its unique deliberate top of 8.5 metres to 11 metres,” says Prisk. “It was an excellent transfer – the elevated elevation has resulted in a very robust gesture that holds the nook of the brand new web site properly and it’s now an actual marker as a replacement.” 

Culling factors out that the situation of the brand new web site, whereas remoted, remains to be very seen. “Regardless of the place you might be, you will note it and it’ll greet you,” he says, “and the brilliant, welcoming hue of the Resene Broom yellow contrasts with the pure hues of the panorama.”

As with all folly venture, it got here with a number of challenges and plenty of learnings alongside the way in which, all of that are deliberately on the coronary heart of the programme.

“From the outset, our mentors made it very clear that buildability could be important to the venture’s success,” says Culling. “So, we had loads of early engagement with mentors Steve Cassidy, Peter Boardman and Gabriela Tufare, actually stepping into the nuts and bolts of how every little thing comes collectively on web site.”

The staff members put the success of the construct all the way down to staying on web site all through the method, waking to sheep outdoors their tents every morning earlier than donning their software belts and starting their 10-hour days. They have been additionally very lucky to have ex-classmate and constructing apprentice Elliot Western available to assist with development, enabling them to keep away from a level of trial and error, and to chop their construct time significantly.

Mabin describes a fancy scaffolding design, which was important when navigating the tapered geometry to achieve full entry to repair the material inside the break up beams. He additionally factors out that the screw pile basis system, a aware sustainability driver of the design, required a slight work-around on web site, highlighting “the fantastic thing about the method, the place you throw away the drawings and depend on important pondering and problem-solving to reach at a answer”.

The 12 posts coming all the way down to the bottom needed to align with the 12 screw piles on the grid and be of three completely different staggered heights due to the slope on which they have been working. “They have been undoubtedly a problem; nevertheless, they labored and did away with the usage of concrete piles,” says Vachias.

One other level the staff may giggle about in hindsight was the period of time spent on portray. “We needed to paint every little thing,” says Prisk, “via all of December, main as much as Christmas. Wanting again, maybe we must always have grabbed each man and his canine to assist out.” We’re speaking 20 litres of undercoat and 40 litres of topcoat over about 150 items of normal timber.

Fortunately, the material sheets have been equipped able to go, eyelets included, by a flag firm in Christchurch. “The principle gesture is the yellow posts however we additionally needed a secondary component to enhance that,” explains Vachias. “Initially, we had deliberate to have the material sheets hooked up on the outdoors edges of the folly however we ended up integrating them inside the kind itself.”

“The unique hākari have been constructed with slender sticks of kauri and pūriri, lashed along with torutoru vines,” says Culling. “The constructions contained terraced phases, which saved kai for the gatherings. We tried to extrapolate this inside component via the usage of the material sheets to create that dialogue between construction and what’s held inside the construction.’’

The white, nearly iridescent cloth now wraps between the horizontal items, giving elevated physique to the visible mass of the construction and taking part in with and capturing the sunshine and shadow.

The dimensions, proportion and top of Yellow Submit delivers a sense of what the staff describes as ‘structural wonderness’ and an actual sense of satisfaction that they have been capable of realise their design and are available inside finances.

“The Yellow Submit is one in all only a few beguiling initiatives which can be without delay easy, logical and coherent, but evocative of precedent,” says folly decide and mentor Pip Cheshire.

“This has been achieved by, as Sir Miles Warren would say, ‘throwing a double six’ on the primary day of the competitors: a robust thought pared again to its necessities then exhaustively examined to make sure its realisation does all that’s obligatory, however no extra. The staff is to be congratulated on its celebration of the brand new Brick Bay folly web site with a placing venture.”

This 12 months’s judges have been Pip Cheshire from Cheshire Architects, Steve Cassidy from Cassidy Building, Karmen Hoare from Resene, Peter Boardman from Construction Design, Keith Mann from Unitec, Amanda Harkness from Structure NZ, Richard and Anna Didsbury from Brick Bay and Jennifer Gao from the 2024 Folly profitable staff, whose folly was named Femme-ly Velues. Brick Bay Folly is sponsored by Resene, Cassidy Building, Cheshire Architects, Construction Design, Unitec, Structure NZ, ArchitectureNow, Sam Hartnett Images and Brick Bay.